Pretentious Water Bottle

after who knows how many months of puzzling out the geometry, running out of the right colors, & feeling like i'd NEVER be done making flower motifs, HERE HE IS!! in all his orange glory!!

the cutest, sweetest, most huggable spider in the WORLD!!! ✨️💖🕷💖✨️

Thank you!!!!!!!

No direction home

The newsreel clips which accompany this voice-over – families trudging along country roads, their belongings stuffed into suitcases and sacks – are all too similar to the footage on nightly news programmes today. But the differences are fascinating. We’ve grown used to seeing displaced people making the arduous journey northwards, over the sea from Africa, and then on through Europe. Casablanca reminds us that, not so long ago, they were travelling in the opposite direction.

When they reach Morocco, many of these people pass the time in its classiest nightspot, Rick’s Café Americain. True, it’s more comfortable than most refugee camps, but the muttered negotiations at its tables will be familiar to anyone who’s seen a documentary about the current crisis: the selling of jewellery for a fraction of its cost; the purchasing of berths on fishing boats for extortionate sums.

And the refugees don’t just trade with jewellery and money. Renault (Claude Rains), the city’s suave French police chief, exchanges exit visas for sexual favours – a transaction which the film views, initially at least, as a harmless game. In one scene, Renault’s assistant comes to his desk and tells him that “another visa problem has come up”. Renault straightens his tie and smiles. “Send her in,” he says. We can respect Curtiz and his team for smuggling such risqué material past the censors, and we can appreciate Rains’ urbane performance. But the film’s forgiving attitude towards Renault’s exploitation hasn’t aged well.

Still, Rick himself is above such abuse. “I don’t buy or sell human beings,” he informs Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet), the city’s black-market kingpin. But as time goes by, Rick realises that turning a blind eye to the buying and selling is just as bad. There is a touching scene in which he rigs the café’s roulette wheel so that a Bulgarian newlywed (Joy Page) doesn’t have to sleep with Renault – thus bringing a tear to the eyes of Rick’s employees and to the audience alike. More moving still is the scene in which the café’s head waiter (SZ Sakall) has a brandy with two elderly Austrians who are about to leave for the US, and compliments them on their broken English. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the German director, declared that this humane little sequence boasts “one of the most beautiful pieces of dialogue in the history of film”.

Several other scenes are reported to have had the cast and crew in tears, partly because so many of them were genuine refugees. Veidt may play a Nazi in the film, but in reality he fled from the Nazis. Both Sakall and Curtiz were Hungarian Jews: Sakall’s three sisters and his niece died in concentration camps. “Nearly all of the some seventy-five actors and actresses cast in Casablanca were immigrants,” says Noah Isenberg in his new book about the film, We’ll Always Have Casablanca. “Among the 14 who earned a screen credit, only three were born in the United States: Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson [the Café’s crooning pianist, Sam], and Joy Page.” (One of the film’s subtlest and slyest ironies is that the so-called ‘Café Américain’ isn’t in America and has barely any Americans in it. What, we’re forced to ask, does ‘American’ mean, anyway?)

And so, while the tale of the star-crossed Rick and Ilsa is a Tinseltown fantasy – for a start, there were never any Nazi officers in the real Casablanca – it is underpinned by the cast’s own traumatic experiences. That’s one reason why the film is so potent, whether you’re aware of the actors’ backgrounds or not. “If you think of … those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents,” wrote Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, “the picture wouldn’t have had anything like the colour and tone it had.”

Rumford 'Rumple' Gold loves his personal space

Much to his dismay, Belle also loves his personal space

I've been wanting to draw this since yesterday ever since I saw my trope card. I drew it today :'D

[in 6 hrs UwU]

Tagging @rumbelletropebingo as required OwO

Does this have lore? Absolutely [a bit]. I made it up as I drew :'D

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.

to celebrate finishing hfw and finally being able to unblock the spoiler tags, here's a couple doods i did in my 2 weeks of hfw insanity <3 (there is much more art to come) (this is a threat)